A New XBOX 360

Yesterday I went back to Costco to return my busted XBOX 360. As I expected, the return was painless and my refund was put onto a Costco Cash card. After that, I went back into the store, grabbed another bundle and I was back out the door. It didn’t take very long, but…

So, there’s this Asian woman two people in front of me. I see she has a cart and all it has in it is a plastic jar of peanuts. That’s it. She is pushing around a cart with peanuts in it. Since I am standing in the return line, I am a little preplexed why she would be in this line as well. After the returns in front of her are finished, she bellies up to the return counter. Yup, she returned the peanuts. The guy in front of me just about lost it. Seriously. She returned peanuts. Bah.

Anyways, I got my 360 setup and all plugged in, but all of my game saves lost. Which brings me to my next point. Xbox support is worthless. I called with one question and I had to be routed to three reps to even get an answer. It’s tough dealing with a call center that is in India. They don’t understand what I am trying to say. I can understand why they do it, but I was given misinformation which lead me to losing all of my saved game information. So, I’ll have to start over in Tiger Woods and the couple other games I had game save information for. I’m kinda upset, but it’ll be OK.

I’m just glad that the console is back in my living room. The last one died almost six months to the day when I purchased it. So, let’s hope that this one doesn’t break. *crosses fingers*

SR 520 @ 148th Ave NE

SR 520 @ 148th Ave NE

SR 520 @ 148th Ave NE » Originally uploaded by rprins.

My commute home is going to be super sweet. Why Seattle, Why?!

Edit: It took almost two hours to get home tonight and I left at 5:30. To get to the first stoplight from my building at Microsoft took almost 50 minutes. It was downhill from there.

Also, some people are real jackasses. For example… I’m at an intersection where traffic from the parking ramp at buildings 122/121 comes out to the street. There are two lanes, one for left turns and one for rights. Seeing that he was too impatient to wait for the left turn, this slimy gentlemen decides to go in the right turn lane and steal next open spot in my lane (right behind me) from the guy who had been waiting at least 10 to 15 minutes. I would have let him in, but I let the car in front of him in.

So, when the next movement was made that opened space in front of me, I didn’t move an inch. I rolled my window down and waved the guy who got jacked in front of my car and let him in. I mean, it’s crazy he even did that, I’m just glad I could let that other guy in.

Heading Home for Thanksgiving

I’m heading back to my parent’s place in Minnesota for the Thanksgiving weekend. It should be good times, as always, and the weather looks to be better than what is in Seattle. So, that should be a nice change. I’m currently sitting at my gate getting some work done before my flight leaves at 3:15p PST. Some observations from today:

  • The airport seems to be as busy as a normal day.
  • I went though security in 5 minutes… tops.
  • I’m glad I reserved a parking space at the lot since it was full.
  • I got free wifi by accident.

Overall, today seems to be like the other days when I traveled back to Minnesota for Thanksgiving. There is a lot of hype about the security lines and whatnot, but I never seem to get stuck in them. I guess I can consider myself lucky. I know one day I’ll have it coming my way real bad.

At any rate, I wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving and I’ll see you after the break.

The Week that Was

I’m glad it’s the weekend.

This past week was pretty busy. If it wasn’t work, I was out doing something else after work and my time at home was pretty limited. Even though I only worked 49 hours last week, it felt like more. I’m pretty sure that’s because the commute home from Redmond sucks. I mean, on Halloween it took me 1h 15m to get to Jamie’s place, which is up the street from me, by taking back roads through Bellevue, then getting on I-90, then I-5. It was pretty slow, but all one needs is patience to tough it out.

As work goes, it has been busy. I’ve been using TimeSnapper to record what I do all day and I’m spending my day in Word, Outlook, Visio, and Excel. On a side note, I love the new Office system. The updates took some getting used to, but I couldn’t imagine using the 2003 system anymore. I’ve been working with two guys on getting our project’s functional specifications out the door on time and it’s been proving to be a learning experience.

So far I’ve submitted seven document for review and sign-off and only one has been approved, our Test Plan. The rest have required some serious re-work and at times it has been quite frustrating. It hasn’t been frustrating because they need re-work as much as it is that I become frustrated with myself that I didn’t do better in the first place and I hate feeling like I’m letting anybody down. Our third round of docs, sign-off e-mail sent Friday, will probably get rejected, but I think that they are getting better in quality.

Like my first sentence said, I’m glad it’s the weekend. I can sleep in, and just do nothing. Well, not nothing, but not work related stuff. I’m sure that next week will be a 40+ week again, but I don’t anticipate it to be more than 50 hours since we only have one spec due this week.

So, with that said, it’s time to get back to enjoy the last afternoon of this weekend.